Nightmare Kingdom: A Romance of the Future

by Barbara Bartholomew

  The quiet of the ship and the size of everything was disconcerting. Each piece of furniture was huge and made of fabrics and metals he found completely unfamiliar.

  Even when he was in the company of the crew, he was left out. Every once in a while the captain would think to address him in textbook English and he knew a few words of the Aremian tongue that he’d learned from his friends from Terrainaine, but silence was natural to these people.

  Oh, he knew they were really descended from the same root. Otherwise they’d never have been able to use human blood. And yeah, he knew that what he was thinking was socially incorrect. Isaiah said they were as human as he was. He called them distant cousins who had left Earth during a time lost to current memory.

  He stared down at the western boots, handcrafted for him in New London by a self-trained artisan to replace the original ones he’d gotten back home and which had worn out long ago and thought about the farm.

  He supposed Gran and Grandpa were gone by now. They’re been fairly old when he’d last left and the thought that he might never see them again still haunted him.

  No doubt his sister Marti was still alive. With her skills, she was probably running a small country or a big company by now. He wondered if she’d ever regretted giving him away to the Feds when he tried to hide out and avoid being taken away.

  He supposed he’d never know, not any more than he had a chance of seeing Earth’s sun or hearing the frogs croaking on the pond on a moonlit night.

  It had been years since he’d felt so damned homesick. He tried to remind himself that New London and his friends there stood for what was home now. Poor Claire, who had spent half her lifetime playing a prominent role in an alien culture.

  No wonder she wanted to be rescued and brought back to Sanctuary. She’d probably kiss the ground when she got there.

  He wondered if they were getting close to the prison planet. Inside the ship, he lost track of time and when he asked the captain about how long the trip would take, the only answer he got was, “It depends on circumstances.”

  He never got a clear explanation of what was meant by that because as he was walking back to his cabin, which was luxurious beyond anything he had ever known, a sharp-pointed thruster popped out from behind him and if something in the swishing sound of movement through the air hadn’t alerted him, he would have been skewered like a roasting hen.

  Instead he dodged with the instinctive reaction of the experienced fighter and took the wound in his right shoulder instead of direct to the heart as his attacker intended.

  He wasn’t aware of making any sound other than the thud as he fell back against the wall, but suddenly he was surrounded by three members of the crew, two of them women, who took down the would-be assassin who was one of their own.

  Apparently he’d been struck in a significant spot because when he touched his hand to where the thruster emerged, he felt blood seeming to pour forth from his damaged form and decided that he was most likely going to die from bleeding to death instead of being stabbed in the heart.

  And what would happen to Claire if he died right here on this little ship on his way to rescue her?

  Before the thought barely flitted through his mazed brain, the Aremians were kneeling over him, doing things that hurt like removing the thruster, a weapon that was not only sharp, but large enough to do major damage and then they were working to stop the blood flow.

  He had time only to think that at this point he was grateful theirs was an advanced civilization because he wouldn’t have had a chance if being treated by Isaiah and the medics he’d trained back at New London.

  But then back home nobody would have stuck a thruster into him.

  And then he blacked out.

  Claire wasn’t surprised when the barbarian not only looked away from Adaeze’s commanding gaze, but actually backed up a couple of steps. She spotted various primitive weapons, mostly knives or even fist-sized stones and wooden clubs within reach of the gamblers, but with the Gare princess staring them down, nobody seemed to want to act on that temptation.

  For the first time she realized what she had in her daughters and their abilities. Adaeze and Lillianne really didn’t even need her; they were a formidable force in themselves.

  Then Lillianne whined, “Mom, it smells so bad in here,” and she was reminded how young they were. The years counted differently in the Aremian Empire, but she had always figured her children’s ages by Earth time. Adaeze was thirteen and Lillianne eleven. They might seem able to look after themselves, but that didn’t mean they didn’t need her.

  “Go on out, baby,” she soothed. “Your sister and I will collect our belongings and be right behind you.”

  Adaeze did not deign to pick up valuables herself, but directed their followers to collect them, but as the girl led the way from the dreary little room, Claire frowned at the suddenly quicker motion of her long legs and at something in the set of her mouth.

  “What is it, Adaeze?” she whispered as they thankfully emerged into the cold open air. “What’s wrong?”

  Her daughter motioned her aside for a private conference. Lillianne joined them, but the rest of the party remained at a polite distance.

  “Someone has attempted to assassinate him,” she said.

  “Assassinate who or whom or whatever?” Claire stumbled in sharp alarm, afraid of the answer.

  “Your friend. Jamie Lewis Ward. One of the crew members stabbed him with a thruster. They are working over him now and the captain is very alarmed.”

  Claire never fainted without good cause, but she came close at this moment. The bright winter day turned abruptly dark and her head whirled.

  “Mom!” Adaeze said.

  Claire straightened and willed herself to strength. She had survived Mathiah’s death. If she had to, she would survive Jamie’s.

  But life would seem much colder and more lonely without the thought that Jamie was out there someplace. She shivered in the wind and picked up her pace to lead the way back to their living quarters, refusing to listen to whatever it was her daughter was trying to tell her.

  She didn’t want to hear that her old friend was dying or already dead.

  When they got to their shack, she sank down into a chair. It wasn’t warm even in here, but at least the cold wind wasn’t sucking out the last bit of her energy. “We really need to see that the people here get some decent housing. It isn’t humane to leave even the worst offenders living like this.”

  “Mom?” Adaeze said again, making it a question this time.

  Claire envisioned Jamie dying somewhere far away and without knowing that his death would even matter to her. She couldn’t cry anymore; she’d cried too much over Mathiah, though always in private where nobody could see her.

  She dashed tears from her face with an angry hand. “I know you probably think they’re lucky just to be alive considering the crimes of which they were convicted.

  “I agree with you, Mother,” Adaeze retorted angrily, “but what can we do about it? We’ll be fortunate if we don’t end up living like this ourselves.”

  Lillianne knelt at her mother’s side and took one of her hands in both of her own. “I can’t reach as far as Adaeze, Mom, but let her tell you what’s happening. Maybe it’s not as bad as we think.”

  “He can’t mean that much to you, Mom.” Adaeze remained at a distance, not an ounce of sympathy in her tone. “You haven’t even seen him since before I was born.”

  “He was my first friend,” Claire flared defensively. “The first true friend I ever had. My father wasn’t like yours. He beat me and so did my stepmother. Jamie, Isaiah and Mack were my friends.”

  Her daughter held the info she needed and feared to hear and she didn’t want to help because she felt her mother was being disloyal to her dad.

  “He’s still alive, though badly wounded,” Adaeze reported stiffly. “But we do have a first class medic and the best equipment on board the cruiser.”

  Hope. She was al
most afraid to let herself feel it. Nothing was worse than when hope faded away.

  “Who would want to kill Jamie?” she asked. “Especially on board our cruiser?”

  Still feeling the reassuring clasp of her younger daughter, she turned in her chair to look up at the older one.

  Adaeze’s usually stoic face had turned to stone, her gaze straight ahead and staring in shock at a scene neither of the other two could see.

  “His name is Maron,” she said in a flat, almost electronic sounding voice. “He is the second engineer, the latest addition to the crew. The captain is questioning him.”

  “One of our own? A member of the imperial guard?” Lillianne asked with obvious shock.

  Adaeze didn’t seem to hear her. “Maron says he is loyal to the emperor, not to the Earth woman. He says the princesses are forbidden, that they are the dust of the ground.”

  “A fanatic,” Claire commented grimly. “But why kill Jamie?”

  “The Earth people are not human. They are like animals. They need to learn a lesson.”

  Lillianne spat out a couple of words from old Earth that she could have learned from only one person. And Claire had thought she’d been so careful about her language around the girls.

  Adaeze’s face turned ashen gray and she fell silent while her mother and sister waited in growing suspense.

  “The captain pronounced him renegade and traitor against the rightful government of Aremia. They cast him out the air locks. He is adrift in space.”

  “What an awful way to die,” Lillianne whispered. “It must be like drowning, trying to breathe when there is no air . . .”

  Claire seeing the look on Adaeze’s face knew how terrible it must have been to see the execution through the captain’s eyes. She motioned Lillianne to silence and got up to push Adaeze into a chair.

  Lillianne hurried to get a cup of water for her sister and Adaeze gulped the liquid down and then started to shake. “Oh, Mommy,” she said, using their baby name for her. “It was awful.”

  She’s only thirteen, Claire reminded herself. For all she seems so intimidatingly grownup at times, she’s only a little girl. She hugged her daughter and Adaeze rested her face against her mother’s breasts.

  Claire longed to know if Jamie remained in the land of the living, but she couldn’t ask anymore of her daughter. Not right now.

  Adaeze seemed to sense her feelings. She managed to choke out a few words. “They’re fighting to save him, Mom, but he’s lost a lot of blood.”

  TWELVE

  When he woke up, Jamie felt that dying might have been easier. His whole body was one intense ache with a point of highest intensity on his right side where the thruster had ripped through him.

  He’d always heard that you usually didn’t have memories of the time right before and during a traumatic injury, but unfortunately he could recall as though in slow motion every second from the instant when he was attacked until he passed out from loss of blood.

  He’d been surrounded by the Aremian crew and not sure who was friend or enemy. Now that he was back to consciousness, he still had no idea who to trust.

  “Your condition is stabilized,” the medic told him without emotion. “We had to give you blood.”

  “Well, that’s turnabout, I guess,” Jamie returned, then felt this was perhaps an inappropriate remark, considering that his life was in this woman’s hands. Somehow he didn’t much care.

  “Who in hell tried to kill me and why?”

  “We can talk about this later.”

  “Not later. Now.” Jamie tried to sit up and quickly determined that would not be a wise thing to do.

  The medic watched gauges around him and what she saw made her frown. “I’ll ask the captain to come and speak to you. He would prefer to tell you himself.”

  Jamie subsided into a doze, coming in and out in a kind of vague way until the man who had identified himself as Captain Thereon of the imperial service stood before. Didn’t any of these people have last names? He thought irritably, then dismissed the whole idea. Things were different on Aremia and he understood very little about their ways.

  “Who was the guy who tried to kill me?”

  “Maron, the second engineer,” the captain said succinctly. “The rest of the crew has been determined to be loyal to the empress regent.”

  Jamie considered. “That’s what it was all about? This guy had it in for poor little Claire?”.

  The captain’s mouth twisted slightly and Jamie gathered that he didn’t care for the description of his empress. Too bad. He’d known Claire longer and knew her vulnerabilities.

  “The empress and the princesses. His loyalties were to the young emperor. There are those who consider the princesses to be unnatural females because of their . . .ah, abilities.”

  “Goes against tradition?”

  The captain knew Earth ways. He nodded.

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “My feelings are hardly significant. My emperor left his family in my trust and named his empress as regent, as was his right. I support the rightful ruler.”

  Jamie knew he wasn’t exactly in fine form. He was weak as a kitten, a creature he hadn’t seen since leaving Earth, and if he managed to get to his feet he’d probably fall promptly on the floor. But the strong protective urge in him made him say, “I’d like to have a little talk with this Maron guy at first opportunity.”

  “You’re too late. He has been executed as a traitor.”

  Jamie stared. “Already. Arrest, trial, jury and judge, all done and the hangman sent in.”

  “Hanging is barbaric. As captain, the duty fell to me and he was outspoken in his admission of guilt. He was jettisoned into space.”

  “Bloody hell!”

  Captain Thereon gave a nod that was like a violent jerk of his head. “It wasn’t pleasant. I considered him a friend.”

  Jamie couldn’t quite take it all in. The thruster attack, his passing out, waking up to find his attacker already beyond his reach. His anger had nowhere to go.

  “I wouldn’t like to be your enemy,” he said.

  Three days later when they slowed to enter Capron’s atmosphere, Jamie was managing to stand on unstable feet while he watched the planet approach on the viewer. He’d heard many stories about the prison planet; most of them made both the environment and the inhabitants sound brutal. He could only hope that Claire and her girls were still alive and unharmed.

  Unlike the bigger ships, the Adaeze could land just about anywhere where there was enough open space. Captain Thereon and his crew settled the cruiser down in the area south of the planet’s only city of any size.

  It looked to be a ramshackle community of makeshift dwellings with domestic animals living alongside or even within the same building and streets that ran with mud and other unpleasant substances.

  To Jamie the smell of animal dung was probably not as unpleasant as to most people. He’d grown up on a farm and the memories associated with the scent were some of the best he’d had.

  He stepped from the ship, leaning on a cane, but refusing the support of the captain’s strong arm. He was just vain enough not to want Claire to see him for the first time in years leaning on someone else.

  He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised that they were there waiting for the ship’s landing, apparently as free as air and not anybody’s hostages. For an instant nobody was present but him and the blue-eyed woman who had only grown more strikingly lovely than the girl he remembered.

  He walked toward her, ignoring the pain that little stroll caused to his damaged body, coming to a stop only a few feet away from where she stood.

  “Jamie,” she said, then hugged him. It hurt, but in a good way. He was relieved to see for himself that on this planet of fierce men this delicate-looking woman was sound and whole.

  “We’ve come to rescue you,” he said and heard a derisive snort that seemed to come from one of the daughters.

  Claire knew he had no business being
up and walking around, but it was reassuring to see that Adaeze hadn’t been deceiving her when she said he would live and eventually be well again.

  She’d never been so anxious in her life as during these last few days as they waited for the little cruiser to approach Capron.

  Now she stepped back to get a good look at him. Adaeze had thought it amusing when he’d said he’d come to rescue her, but Claire didn’t think there was anything the least bit funny about Jamie’s words.

  She felt rescued. Here he was her old friend, who once would have sacrificed his life for her safety and even though she recognized this strongly built man only remotely as the boy she had known, sparks clicked between them just as they had back when they were both fifteen.

  Flanked by her loyal army of supporters, she gestured at her daughters. “This is Adaeze, my older daughter,” she indicated the dark-haired girl, and then the one with cotton white hair, “and Lillianne, who is younger.”

  Jamie nodded gravely. “Glad to meet the two of you,” he said politely.

  Lillianne smiled and gave a formal little curtsey. Adaeze made no gesture of acknowledgement.

  Captain Thereon saluted her and the princesses and inquired politely, “Shall we take off immediately, Madam?”

  Obviously he wasn’t sure whether all these people following them were supporters or a threat to their safety. “Not yet, Captain,” she said. “A farewell dinner is being given in our honor. We couldn’t miss that.”

  He didn’t blink an eye, but she could see that the girls were both messaging him. No doubt they were filling him in on what had happened since he’d departed. A few other mental voices were also probably speaking up, considering that the majority of their supporters were mind speakers.

  Only she, Jamie and a good number of residents on the planet were left out of the conversation.

  Jamie’s instincts told him to grab hold of the three of them and race for the safety of the cruiser. But he knew from his dealings with animals back on the farm that often if you ran, something would decide it was supposed to chase you. So he had no choice but to follow Claire’s lead.